The Mike Leigh DVD Feature FIlm Collection
DVD BOX SET DEBUTS 7 APRIL 2008
Thin Man Films proudly presents The Mike Leigh DVD Collection, showcasing the writer-director’s outstanding ten feature films in a stunning box set to own from 7 April, priced £59.99 RRP. The release will coincide with that of his new feature film Happy-Go-Lucky.
Mike Leigh is one of Britain’s most respected film directors, with a career spanning nearly 40 years. Always creating his own original screenplays by working in a unique way with his actors, Leigh has earned world-wide critical acclaim for his acutely observed work. While his movies challenge the audience to ask questions and to reflect, they never fail to be moving, funny and highly entertaining.
PREVIOUSLY UNAVAILABLE FILMS & CONTENT
Fans will be thrilled that Leigh’s award-winning classic Naked makes its first UK DVD appearance, as does his 1971 feature Bleak Moments. Also included is the recently unavailable Career Girls. The box set includes a 50-page companion booklet with a complete filmography, stills and quotes, plus a bonus DVD. This comprises specially commissioned footage of Mike Leigh in conversation with twelve of his actors, the 2002 broadcast South Bank Show on Leigh, and his controversial 1991 London Film Festival trailer.
AWARD-WINNING
Mike Leigh has won a number of prizes at major international film festivals. Most notably he won the Best Director award at Cannes for Naked in 1993 and the Palme d’Or in 1996 for Secrets & Lies. He won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice Film Festival in 2004 with Vera Drake. He has been nominated for an Academy Award® five times, twice each for Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake (Best Original Screenplay and Best Director) and once for Topsy-Turvy (Best Original Screenplay).
Released prior to the opening of his new film Happy-Go-Lucky and a new book from Faber Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, now is the perfect time to celebrate Leigh’s incredible body of work and achievements through this new DVD collection.
THE MIKE LEIGH DVD FEATURE FILM COLLECTION
Vera Drake (2004)
London, 1950: Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) lives with her husband Stan (Phil Davis) and their grown-up children, Sid and Ethel. They are not rich, but they are a happy, close-knit family. Vera cleans houses, Stan is a mechanic in his brother’s garage, Sid works as a tailor and Ethel works in a factory testing light bulbs. But selfless Vera has a sideline which she keeps secret from all those around her.
Without accepting payment, she helps young women to end unwanted pregnancies. When one of these girls is rushed to hospital following the abortion, the police investigation leads to Vera, and her world comes crashing in on her.
Nominated for 3 Oscars: Best Director (Mike Leigh), Best Screenplay (Mike Leigh) and Best Actress (Imelda Staunton). Won 3 BAFTA’s, including Best Director (Mike Leigh) and Best Actress (Imelda Staunton).
Special Features: Cast & Crew documentary, trailer.
All or Nothing (2002)
A love story about a couple whose deep feelings for each other are rekindled when they are hit by a major family disaster. Set on a run-down family estate, All or Nothing is both poignant and funny.
Phil (Timothy Spall) is a sad but philosophical mini-cab driver, while his partner Penny (Lesley Manville) works in a supermarket. Their daughter works in a home for the elderly, and their overweight son is unemployed. The film paints a vivid portrait of their lives, and those of some of their neighbours.
In competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Special Features: Commentary by Mike Leigh, Interviews and Trailer.
Topsy-Turvy (1999)
How Gilbert & Sullivan came to write their greatest hit, The Mikado. Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner star as the great duo in Mike Leigh’s sumptuous evocation of the Victorian world, with its obsession with new-fangled devices like the telephone and the fountain pen. Winner of two Oscars and a BAFTA, Topsy-Turvy is funny, sad, exotic, fascinating and sexy. Regarded by many as the most accurate movie about backstage life ever made, it includes brilliant reconstructions of the original Savoy productions, as well as the famous sequence in the Japanese Village Exhibition. The film overflows with Sullivan’s infectious, joyous music, which will leave you humming long after it’s over.
Special Features: Commentary by Mike Leigh, Trailer.
Career Girls (1997)
Career Girls is a wonderful film about friendship, love, sex and hilarious memories of student life. It is full of classic one-liners, hilarious comedy and tear-inducing emotion.
Former college flatmates Annie (Lynda Steadman) and Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) meet up in London for the weekend. Naturally both girls have changed since their student days of some ten years earlier. The curry-loving, “Cure”-obsessed, acne-ridden and moody flatmates of yesteryear have been replaced by confident career girls of today. As they talk, go flat-hunting, get drunk and bump into people from their past, the girls start to reminisce.
Mike Leigh cleverly weaves together past and present as we share their memories; the touching, the funny and the tragic.
Special Features: Trailer.
Secrets & Lies (1996)
This superlative drama, at once hysterically funny and profoundly sad, examines a wounded contemporary British family. Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young black optometrist, has just buried her beloved adoptive mother. In her sorrow, she embarks on a search for her birth mother, who turns out to be Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), a white factory worker living a lonely life with her surly daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). No one in the family, except Cynthia’s brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) and his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan), knows that the teenage Cynthia gave up a child for adoption without ever seeing the baby.
Hortense contacts Cynthia, and after a heart-wrenching reconciliation, they become best friends. Cynthia convinces Hortense to attend a party and meet the family as a mate from work–but during the cake and champagne celebration, the family’s secrets and lies emerge in a cathartic, emotional sweep.
Special Features: Interview with Mike Leigh, short film - A Sense of History, Trailer.
Naked (1993)
Regarded as many as Mike Leigh’s masterpiece. Daring and abrasive, Naked follows the anarchic Johnny (David Thewlis) on his dark journey through a corrosive world. A profound and often shocking film, it bursts with ideas and contradictions, and is filtered with love, sex and black humour. Also stars Lesley Sharp (Bob & Rose).
Special Features: Commentary by Mike Leigh, David Thewlis and Katrin Cartlidge. Trailer
Life Is Sweet (1990)
Mike Leigh’s compassionate comedy about families, food, burger bars, restaurants, chocolate, sex, anorexia, plumbing, hope, love, and much else, including spoons. Savour Timothy Spall’s hilarious manic restauranteur with his ridiculous recipes, Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent as the loving Wendy and Andy, and Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks as their very different twin daughters. Also stars Stephen Rea.
Special Features: Short The Short & Curlies, Trailer.
High Hopes (1988)
Contrasting its gentle, considerate hero and heroine, Cyril (Phil Davis) and Shirley (Ruth Sheen) with Cyril’s greedy, suburban sister and her husband, High Hopes ask us to reflect on the question of bringing children into the chaotic modern world. Confused by the difficulty of staying true to one’s socialist principles, and angry with Margaret Thatcher, the couple care for Cyril’s frail, elderly mother (Edna Doré), and cope with the posh, unsympathetic neighbours who are ‘gentrifying’ her street. Moving, funny and provocative.
Special Features: Interview with Mike Leigh and On Set Footage, Production Notes and Biographies.
High Hopes won the Evening Standard Peter Sellers Award for Comedy (1990), and Ruth Sheen was European Actress of the year.
Meantime (1984)
Meantime centres on an East End family, Mavis, Frank and their sons Mark and Colin, and their experience of unemployment, poverty and life in early 1980s Britain. When Colin comes under the influence of skinhead Coxy and when Mavis’s better off sister Barbara offers Colin work, family tensions erupt into conflict. Mike Leigh’s film has a superb cast of then unknowns, including Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Tim Roth and Phil Daniels. Meantime is a memorable and closely observed account of life in Thatcher’s Britain.
Special Features: Interviews with Mike Leigh, Tim Roth and Marion Bailey.
Bleak Moments (1971)
Leigh’s first film. An attractive young woman, Sylvia, lives with her mentally handicapped adult sister, Hilda. She lets her empty garage to a drop-out hippy, Norman, whose task is to duplicate an alternative magazine in it. And she has a disastrous relationship with a tongue-tied schoolteacher called Peter. These are just some of Mike Leigh’s brilliantly conceived gallery of suburban characters, living their lives of quiet desperation and frequent absurdity. Moving and hilarious.
Bleak Moments won the Golden Hugo of Chicago and the Golden Leopard of Lorcarno, both 1973.
Special Features: None
BONUS DISC
Includes: Mike Leigh in Conversation with his Actors (new and exclusive to the DVD Box Set) - South Bank Show (2002)
PRESS CONTACTS
The Mike Leigh DVD Collection
For review copies and images please contact:
Steven Pearson @ Premier PR on 020 7292 6466
Web: www.premierpr.com & www.thinmanfilms.co.uk
Happy-Go-Lucky
For cinema release contact:
Donna Mills @ Premier PR on 020 7292 8330
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh Faber book
Contact:
Alex Holroyd @ faber on 020 7465 7523
